RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewA quality rom-com is a dance: a delicate balancing act of character and pacing, wish fulfillment and relatability, tension and levity, comedic timing and sentimentality. It can be noisy and shiny or cozy and intimate, but it must always be romantic. And — here’s the crucial part many overlook — it must be genuinely funny. Contemporary rom-coms that check all of these boxes seem vanishingly rare, but by Page 7 of Wild Things, a new novel by the English author and journalist Laura Kay, I knew I had found one ... I had come across a piece of writing that gave me that elusive rom-com thrill ... The story that unfolds is buoyant, charming, delectably wistful and quietly earnest ... Kay writes with a breezy but grounded crispness, like a bike ride through the country. She makes precise choices in pert, clever sentences. Jokes, quips and asides land with neat efficiency, always off-the-cuff, never self-satisfied or self-conscious ... An excellent romantic comedy. It is not a sunny sky, but a sunbeam: energy focused into a patch of hopeful light.
Rafael Frumkin
RaveThe Washington PostLike most great capers, Confidence begins with a scrappy underdog down on his luck ... Dark and cutting humor ... Confidence is a propulsive, cheeky, eat-the-rich page-turner to satisfy the craving for a well-crafted caper.
Isaac Fellman
RaveNew York Times Book ReviewIt’s tempting to slot into the most evident groove of interpretation with Dead Collections: that vampirism is a metaphor for being trans ... But Sol’s story is much messier, much funnier and a lot more interesting than a one-to-one allegory, especially once he meets the sincere, luminescent Elsie ... The story that unfolds around them is equal parts romance and mystery ... Fellman knows exactly to whom he’s writing: the Elsies and Sols of the world, grown-up queer nerds who perhaps once identified as cisgender ... Fellman’s playful but deliberate approach to form, his deft way of presenting his own canon and then transfiguring it on the page, would feel familiar to them ... One of Fellman’s simplest but most effective form experiments is a matter-of-fact pronoun switch: When Elsie and Sol have gender-exploratory sex, the narration transmutes Elsie’s pronouns from \'she\' to \'he\' until his orgasm, a textual revelation of gender euphoria ... [A] thoughtful, acerbic, bracingly hopeful book.
